Research and development of a large-scale modern recreational fishery marine ranch System

The main problems facing the development of China's marine aquaculture industry include improper use of marine resources, overfishing, and seawater pollution. Large-scale marine ranch based on ecological environment provides a promising solution for solving the above problems and achieving the sustainable development of the marine aquaculture industry. Therefore, this study presents a novel design of a large-scale recreational fishery marine ranch system, which consists of three major subsystems including 1) management platform, 2) deep-sea cage group, and 3) environmental supporting facilities (such as artificial reefs, algae planting areas and seagrass beds, etc.). The management platform is a multifunctional system combining areas and subsystems for living, entertainment, leisure, monitoring, and automatic feeding management, etc. The usage of deep-sea cage group makes the most of the ocean space. When being integrated with those ecosystem-based environmental supporting facilities, it also addresses the seawater pollution issue that is generally encountered by conventional cage-based farming systems. Preliminary calculation and simulation results show that the expected design goals can be basically achieved. The overall goal of this research is to combine the sustainable development of the marine aquaculture industry, assist the development of the tertiary industry, and the continuous improvement of the living environment, which in turn will maximize the comprehensive benefits.